Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/491

436 the year 306 B.C., at the age of 35, he returned to Athens, and established a philosophical school in a garden which he had purchased near that city. These gardens, the , have become as famous as the  or porch of the Stoics, or as the  of Plato and his followers, or as the Lyceum of Aristotle and the Peripatetics. In these groves Epicurus spent the remainder of his life surrounded by numerous friends and pupils. His mode of life was simple and temperate, and the aspersions of satirists, and the calumnies of those who describe him as a man devoted to sensual pleasures, are not entitled to the smallest degree of credit. However erroneous his doctrines may have been, and whatever mischief they may have occasioned, the character of the philosopher himself seems to have been very unjustly impeached by the voice of slander. He died in the year 270 B.C., at the age of 72, after a painful and lingering illness, which he endured with a philosophical fortitude which a Stoic might have envied and admired, but which he could not have surpassed.

18. In the present lecture I shall endeavour to give you some account of the moral philosophy of Epicurus, exhibiting his opinions rather as they stand contrasted with those of the Stoics than as they are in themselves, and irrespective of that contrast. The contrast which I propose to draw, and of which I have already given you the outline, between